Distributed sensing with low-cost mobile sensors towards a sustainable IoT

Cities are monitored by sparsely positioned high-cost reference stations that fail to capture local variations. Although these stations must be ubiquitous to achieve high spatio-temporal resolutions, the required capital expenditure makes that infeasible. Here, low-cost IoT devices come into prominence; however, non-disposable and often non-rechargeable batteries they have pose a huge risk for the environment. The projected numbers of required IoT devices will also yield to heavy network traffic, thereby crippling the RF spectrum. To tackle these problems and ensure a more sustainable IoT, the cities must be monitored with fewer devices extracting highly granular data in a self-sufficient manner. Hence, this paper introduces a network architecture with energy harvesting low-cost mobile sensors mounted on bikes and unmanned aerial vehicles, underpinned by key enabling technologies. Based on the experience gained through real-world trials, a detailed overview of the technical challenges encountered when using low-cost sensors and the requirements for achieving high spatio-temporal resolutions in the 3D space are highlighted. Finally, to show the capability of the envisioned architecture in distributed sensing, a case study on air quality monitoring investigating the variations in particulate and gaseous pollutant dispersion during the first lockdown of COVID-19 pandemic is presented. The results showed that using mobile sensors is as accurate as using stationary ones with the potential of reducing device numbers, leading to a more sustainable IoT.